Using makeshift supplies, donated hoops and years worth of his own savings, South Jeffco resident Brian Smith has been spreading his love of basketball throughout small African villages.

The backboards and courts have a distinctly homemade appearance. Children play on compacted dirt, and available timber is cemented into the ground to form a sturdy pole. On the back of each wooden backboard, Smith paints a globe accentuated with lines to make it resemble a basketball.

The Jefferson County Public Library board pared its list of 26 candidates for library director to two last week.
The library named as finalists David Farnan, the Douglas County Libraries’ associate director of community services, and Cynthia Kolaczynski , deputy director of the Maricopa Public Library District. The person selected will succeed former Jeffco libraries director Marcellus Turner, who was hired to head the Seattle Public Library system.
Both Farnan and Kolaczynski hold master of library science degrees.

Pornographic images may soon be blocked from computers in Jefferson County public libraries, though the textual content of websites such as those of Playboy and Penthouse may not.

At a library study session Aug. 11, board members weighed several options in regulating Internet content, including doing nothing at all. Other possible choices include blocking only images considered pornographic or blocking pornographic websites in their entirety.

Though library staff and board members seemed to favor filtering images, that process would have several flaws.

The Jeffco Sheriff’s Office arrested a man July 27 in connection with recent purse thefts in South Jeffco, Lakewood, Broomfield and Arvada.

Timothy Allen Browne, 43, has yet to be formally charged in relation to the thefts. However, Browne, who was recently paroled by the Department of Corrections, has been charged with a parole violation and a count of aggravated motor vehicle theft.

Preschool is considered by many to be the first fundamental step in a child’s education. But for some, an early start on learning can’t come early enough.

A new South Jeffco Montessori school is attempting to address that need, offering programs for infants only 6 weeks out of the womb to children as old as 3 — the age at which traditional preschool typically begins.

The Jeffco commissioners are poised to enact a distressed-property ordinance designed to prevent foreclosed homes from becoming flophouses, nearly a year after the county lobbied the state legislature to allow such measures.

The proposed ordinance, which the Sheriff’s Office revised after the commissioners earlier this year criticized a previous version as too intrusive on property rights, could be passed in as little as 60 days.

Ugly, decaying bus-stop benches are an epidemic in South Jeffco, and the county is planning to address the problem by revamping its advertising-vendor policy, officials said at an Aug. 2 meeting with the county commissioners.

Chief District Judge Brooke Jackson was just over a year into his judicial career when he was assigned the highest-profile cases in Jefferson County history — the lawsuits filed following the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School.

He was also handed his first death-penalty case after only two weeks in the job.